Abstract
Electrons at the border of localization generate exotic states of matter across all classes of strongly correlated electron materials and many other quantum materials with emergent functionality. Heavy electron metals are a model example, in which magnetic interactions arise from the opposing limits of localized and itinerant electrons. This remarkable duality is intimately related to the emergence of a plethora of novel quantum matter states such as unconventional superconductivity, electronic-nematic states, hidden order and most recently topological states of matter such as topological Kondo insulators and Kondo semimetals and putative chiral superconductors. The outstanding challenge is that the archetypal Kondo lattice model that captures the underlying electronic dichotomy is notoriously difficult to solve for real materials. Here we show, using the prototypical strongly-correlated antiferromagnet CeIn3, that a multi-orbital periodic Anderson model embedded with input from ab initio bandstructure calculations can be reduced to a simple Kondo-Heisenberg model, which captures the magnetic interactions quantitatively. We validate this tractable Hamiltonian via high-resolution neutron spectroscopy that reproduces accurately the magnetic soft modes in CeIn3, which are believed to mediate unconventional superconductivity. Our study paves the way for a quantitative understanding of metallic quantum states such as unconventional superconductivity.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | 8239 |
| Journal | Nature Communications |
| Volume | 14 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Dec 2023 |
Funding
M.J. would like to thank Georg Ehlers for useful discussions concerning the setup of the CNCS experiment and acknowledges fruitful discussions with Bruce Normand. Work at Los Alamos National Laboratory was performed under the U.S. DOE, Office of Science, BES project “Quantum Fluctuations in Narrow Band Systems”. This research used resources at the Spallation Neutron Source, a DOE Office of Science User Facility operated by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. WS is supported through funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No 884104 (PSI-FELLOW-III-3i). Z.W. was supported by funding from the Lincoln Chair of Excellence in Physics. During the writing of this paper, Z.W. was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy through the University of Minnesota Center for Quantum Materials, under Award No. DE-SC-0016371. FR thanks the hospitality of the University of Tokyo. Y.N. and R.A. acknowledge funding through Grant-in-Aids for Scientific Research (JSPS KAKENHI, Japan) [Grant No. 20K14423 and 21H01041, and 19H05825, respectively] and “Program for Promoting Researches on the Supercomputer Fugaku” (Project ID:hp210163) from MEXT, Japan. M.J. would like to thank Georg Ehlers for useful discussions concerning the setup of the CNCS experiment and acknowledges fruitful discussions with Bruce Normand. Work at Los Alamos National Laboratory was performed under the U.S. DOE, Office of Science, BES project “Quantum Fluctuations in Narrow Band Systems”. This research used resources at the Spallation Neutron Source, a DOE Office of Science User Facility operated by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. WS is supported through funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No 884104 (PSI-FELLOW-III-3i). Z.W. was supported by funding from the Lincoln Chair of Excellence in Physics. During the writing of this paper, Z.W. was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy through the University of Minnesota Center for Quantum Materials, under Award No. DE-SC-0016371. FR thanks the hospitality of the University of Tokyo. Y.N. and R.A. acknowledge funding through Grant-in-Aids for Scientific Research (JSPS KAKENHI, Japan) [Grant No. 20K14423 and 21H01041, and 19H05825, respectively] and “Program for Promoting Researches on the Supercomputer Fugaku” (Project ID:hp210163) from MEXT, Japan.